The headline on William Safire's New York Times obituary described
him as "an oracle of language" and the Times' chairman Arthur Sulzberger
praised his "wonderful sermons on the use and abuse of language." His
longtime agent Morton Jankelow called him "the high priest of language
usage."
That was all meant as tribute, of course, but
it chiefly reflected what people expected a language columnist to be.
It didn’t have anything to do with why so many readers turned straight
to Safire's language column when they opened the Times Magazine on Sunday morning.
They were drawn by his unremittingly jaunty prose, as he laced his
observations with etymological tidbits, puns, alliterations, and
allusions. The last thing they were looking for was sermons or ex cathedra pronouncements about
grammar and diction. (If Safire had written that sentence he'd probably
have added a parenthetical about how ex
cathedra came from the Latin for "from the professor's chair"
and then noted that speaking ex
cathedra wasn't the same as telling tales out of shul.)
Safire had his views, of course. He defended
the traditional distinctions between disinterested
and uninterested, enormity and enormousness, and precipitate and precipitous.
But while he may have enjoyed his decades as
the lone conservative voice on the Times'
op-ed page, when it came to language he didn't see any point in
standing athwart history yelling "Stop!" As he put it, "After a
while, words come to mean what most people think they mean, not what we
say they ought to mean." That's why he abandoned his objections to the
use of verbal in place of oral, and alarmed traditionalists
by accepting the use of hopefully
as a sentence adverb, as in "Hopefully the war will end soon." He
didn't take any satisfaction in seeing himself as part of the lonely
and embattled minority of We Who Know Better. For Safire, usage
standards had to ultimately rest on a broad educated consensus, part of
the common understanding that makes public discourse possible.
That's not what people originally expected of him.
When Safire began doing his language column in 1979, the field had been
taken over by the pop grammarians, as they were called -- critics like
Edwin Newman and John Simon, who had turned grammar into a new front in
the culture wars. The decline of English came to stand in for a general
collapse of societal standards, under assault from unruly minorities,
disrespectful youth, officious bureaucrats, pretentious intellectuals,
and educators infected with the loosey-goosey attitudes that went by
the new name of permissivism. Before then, usage had been a largely
nonpartisan concern. Now Newsweek
could write of "an outbreak of right-wing linguistic commentary," as
all at once your position on who and whom became a sign of your
political affiliation. And who better to exemplify the new right-wing
grammarians than a former Nixon and Agnew speechwriter who had actually
scripted the opening act of the culture wars a decade earlier?
But Safire defied expectations and outlived several
generations of pop grammarians, precisely because he didn't try to use
language to advance any broader cultural or political agenda. There was
no apocalyptic bombast about the corruption of English or the
indignities that ignorant and lazy speakers were visiting on the tongue
of Shakespeare. (I'm always puzzled by those evocations of the Bard --
it's like pointing at a can of paint and saying, "This is the medium of
Rembrandt, and people are slathering it all over their garage doors.")
And he had no patience for the keening hyperbole of people who
described grammatical missteps with terms like "ghastly," and
"abomination" -- words that he reserved for talking about Nazi
collaborators or the more intrusive clauses of the Patriot Act.[1]
He wasn't a snob, either. He would never have
implied that correct grammar was a badge of social distinction or that
incorrect grammar was a personal or social failing. You can't imagine
him comparing a poet who confused between
and among with someone picking
his nose at a party, the way John Simon once did. And he wasn't
susceptible to the grammatical vapors that affect writers like Lynne
Truss -- the people who like to describe lapses of grammar as setting
their teeth on edge, making their skin crawl, or leaving them gasping
for breath, as if they'd spent all their lives up till now closeted
with Elizabeth and Darcy in the morning room at Pemberley.
What was most notable about the column was its
almost ostentatious civility. Safire gave due consideration to opposing
points of view and was gracious to his critics, to the point of
printing their letters and occasionally giving them guest columns to
write. And he almost relished acknowledging his errors and changes of
heart. After you'd read a language column on Sunday, it could be
disconcerting to pick up the weekday paper and see how relentless and
sometimes intemperate he could be toward political targets like Hillary
Clinton and Anita Hill.
Safire's political dictionary is a true work
of scholarship, the one book of his that people will still be
consulting twenty-five years from now. But aside from his expertise in
political terminology, he wasn't really a language maven. His
speculations about word origins could be dubious and even a little
dotty, and he'd get tangled in grammatical thickets when he tried to
sort out the difference between which
and that. Linguists gave him
a hard time over some of those matters, and he responded by adding a
lot of us to his rolodex. (I say "us" because he asked me for help with
some items, too.)
But his special gift was in conveying his
pleasure in ruminating about language. It wasn't just that he loved
words -- who doesn't? But he really, really liked them. [1] As best I can tell,
Safire used abomination twice
in his "On Language" columns, both times in joking reference to his own
usage.